I
Water into wine at a wedding, this is the first sign that
Jesus performed. We have here such a tiny and puzzling story.
In the grand scheme of things, the event is insignificant
and we know very little about this wedding at Cana except that these were
friends or possibly even family of Mary and Jesus.
John is the only gospel to recount this event and John will eventually
tell us that this is indeed very
John sets us up to see this event as significant. This
wedding that is otherwise a quite ordinary event, a wedding in an insignificant
town in Galilee, that would be unknown to us except for this story. We don’t even know the names of the couple
being married. The event in and of itself is like so many events in our lives,
and event that will be repeated by many others, forgotten in time.
John says this wedding took place on the third day. If we read the Gospel in a literal historical
way, we may think John is saying that this took place on the third day after
John Identified Jesus as the Lamb of God and Jesus’ first disciples started to
follow him. But it is more likely that saying
this occurred on the third day is to make us think of the Resurrection. Just before this Jesus tells Nathaniel that
he will see the heavens opened up and the angels of God ascending and descending
upon the son of man, a reference to the crucifixion. John has prepared us to see this as no
ordinary event, even though it is simply an ordinary wedding of ordinary people
in an ordinary town.
Even so, Jesus doesn’t at first see the significance of this
moment, rather it is his mother, Mary, who sees and at whose behest and insistence
he performs this his first sign that reveals Jesus’ glory and the glory of
God. Jesus even says that it is not
time, the Third day hasn’t yet come, and yet it is already the Third day.
In this moment things begin to blur. Jesus provides some of the
best wine the steward of the wedding feast has ever tasted, and in that moment
this ordinary wedding feast becomes a feast of the kingdom of God, the wedding
feast of the Lamb.
And so we read Isaiah 62 where God promises to marry Israel
and the land. And so there has been
speculation that this wedding at Cana was Jesus’ wedding, and this is why the
bride and groom aren’t mentioned or named.
Historically speaking that is at best speculation, and at worst a form
of literalism that obscures the significance of Jesus’ first sign.
In that moment, at an ordinary wedding, in an ordinary town,
at the marriage of two people whose names are lost to history (perhaps John own
memory), whose celebration was about to be cut short, Jesus in providing wine
shows himself to be the Bridegroom, the one through whom God has married humanity
and all creation.
Here at the beginning we are at the end. Here we are already
at the joy of the Resurrection, of the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost and
the consummation of all things, the marriage feast of the Lamb.
Mary insists on the joy of the celebration not being cut
short, and so Jesus’ ministry that leads to the Cross, begins in joy and as a
sign of the marriage of God and God’s creation in Jesus of Nazareth. This marriage
isn’t complete or consummated without the Passion, and yet it was accomplished through
God the son becoming human through Mary the mother of God.
Yes, lines are blurred, yes history and the insignificant
and the significant come together in this moment. The wedding at Cana is and
isn’t an ordinary wedding, and it was and wasn’t Jesus’ wedding feast, the
wedding feast of the lamb. This was the
first sign that Jesus performed revealing his glory and his disciples believed
in him. Through this sign of turning water into wine at an ordinary wedding,
the wedding at Cana became the wedding feast of the lamb before its time.
Through this sign we like Mary may see and name the ways in
which this joyful feast, the wedding feast of the lamb is breaking into our
ordinary everyday lives.
We are in ordinary Time after the Epiphany, we have begun
counting Sundays, but this isn’t a time of drudgery or just killing time, rather
it is a time infused with the light of Christ, of God’s manifestation in human
flesh in Jesus of Nazareth.
May our hearts be changed in this time after the Epiphany,
may we have eyes to see. Don’t cut short
the celebration. Basque in the insight
that the love and joy of union with God is found now, even in the midst of the
most ordinary events, even in the midst of dreary and cold winter. God will consummate this joy, and we will
also know sorrow before all is accomplished.
Yet today is also the Third day, the time to celebrate, the day of our enlightenment.
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